NFL banning ‘tush push’ fresh off Eagles’ Super Bowl win would’ve been a bad look

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Start greasing the light poles. Or, as Philadelphia Eagles fans would have it, go lubricate the lampposts with the tears of their vanquished rivals.

Once again, in the City of Brotherly Shove, it’s celebration time.

The Eagles, fresh off their dominant victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, secured an unlikely triumph in a suburban Minneapolis hotel ballroom Wednesday, staving off a strong push to ban the team’s signature short-yardage play.

The “tush push,” also known as the Brotherly Shove, lives to fight another season.

And the Eagles — who brought retired center Jason Kelce to the NFL’s spring meeting as an A-List advocate and whose owner, Jeffrey Lurie, spent half an hour making an impassioned plea for the play’s survival — can exhale, at least for another 10 months or so.

This was the right outcome, even if there are good reasons for getting rid of the play, and eliminating the pushing and pulling of ball carriers in general. Before 2005, none of that was allowed, and many of us would be fine going back to the way it was. While there’s no overwhelming evidence that the Brotherly Shove (or its less-ballyhooed cousin in Buffalo) has had negative health-and-safety ramifications, it’s fair to assess whether it could eventually lead to a catastrophic injury.

However, invoking this ban now would have been a bad, bad look, not to mention a motivational gift to the league’s most talented team. For all the talk about how the tush push doesn’t look like a football play, the optics of depriving the Eagles of a competitive advantage they worked hard to craft were far ghastlier.

The Eagles’ rivals for NFL supremacy would have looked like sore losers. And it would have been hard to convince people otherwise.

Yet heading into Wednesday’s pre-vote discussion, the belief was that at least 24 owners (the three-quarters threshold for a rule change) were willing to absorb that stigma.

Then Kelce walked in with Lurie, intent on pulling off an unlikely comeback in the final seconds. Both men hurled their share of hyperbole.

pic.twitter.com/bQh1wDWhTN

— Philadelphia Eagles (@Eagles) May 21, 2025

The six-time first-team All-Pro center insisted to the owners, “If I could run 60 tush pushes a game, I’d come back.” That seems at odds with some of Kelce’s past depictions of the act, including his admission during the 2023 season to Fox’s Laura Okmin that he habitually yelled “F— my life!” while being propelled to the bottom of the pile.

Lurie, in making his case, called the tush push “the safest play in the history of the game.”

The kneeldown would like a word (unless Greg Schiano is involved).

Significantly, the NFL’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Allen Sills, was not at Wednesday’s meeting to offer his assessment. That dubious decision was one reason nine other owners sided with Lurie and voted against the proposal — officially submitted by the Green Bay Packers, with a not-so-subtle push from commissioner Roger Goodell — leaving it two votes short of passage.

Some owners believed they were being railroaded, which was one of several objections to the overall process. The publicly owned Packers, the only club without a nominal owner, seemed to have been strategically chosen by the commissioner. In the end, their top decision-makers had a right to feel exploited.

The Packers won’t be able to channel that into some sort of “Us Against the World” mantra that permeates their locker room. However, had the vote passed, the defending champs could have. Even after molly-whopping Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in New Orleans last February, the 2025 Eagles would have had reason to cast themselves as aggrieved outcasts on a mission to vanquish their avengers.

Think 2007 Patriots — or January 2015 through February 2018 Patriots — but without the scandal.

Heck, perhaps newly-extended coach Nick Sirianni will be able to use the attempted banning of the Brotherly Shove as a call to action.

In defending the Eagles’ honor, it’s important to remember that gamesmanship — and the search for a competitive advantage — is part of pro football. A decade ago, after signing Tim Tebow, the Eagles proposed a rule change that would have (in part) moved two-point conversion attempts from the 2-yard line to the 1 I’m sure it was a total coincidence that Tebow’s skill set aligned with the proposal; alas, it didn’t pass, and Tebow was cut before the start of the 2015 season.

This time, Philly finessed the existing rules and came up with a nearly unstoppable play. Taking that away seems punitive, especially in the wake of a championship. However, if and when we enter an offseason in which the Eagles aren’t the reigning Lombardi-hoisters, getting rid of the tush push won’t bother me nearly as much.

For one thing, its aesthetics are awful. Further, if a center (or other player) suffers a severe injury while buried under hundreds and hundreds of pounds’ worth of bodies, it’s going to be hard to look back and say we couldn’t have all seen it coming.

Lastly, in relation to the ongoing (and increasingly skewed) yin/yang of offense vs. defense, pushing does sometimes feel like an unfair advantage.

When defensive players shove back a ball carrier, the whistle blows almost immediately, and the player is given forward progress to the point of contact. And in that context, any defensive player who comes in hard risks incurring an unnecessary roughness penalty for contact deemed too harsh, even if the whistle hasn’t yet blown.

Conversely, in recent seasons we’ve seen a rise in plays in which ball carriers (usually outside the hashmarks) have their progress halted but get pushed from behind by one or more teammates — and the play is allowed to continue for several seconds, with significant yards added on.

Moments like that make me want all pushing taken out of the game, and I don’t think I’m alone. Until then, if nothing else, the league needs to direct its officials to stop doing this. If a ball carrier’s progress is stopped, stop the play; let it work both ways.

While I’m all for tweaking the rules to make the game better — and safer — getting rid of the tush push now would not have been forward progress. Rather, it would have reeked of hastiness, convenience and sloppy logic. Worst of all, it would have seemed vindictive.

The Eagles earned this advantage, just as they earned that Lombardi. Let them have their moment.

— Dianna Russini contributed reporting. 

(Top photo of Jalen Hurts and Eagles preparing for a tush push:
Andy Lewis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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